Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Every four years we have the Olympic Games, and we have a U.S. Presidential Election. And I think we can all agree on one thing: they both make for great TV. So after those of you in the U.S. have gone out and voted, then fidgeted through the rest of the working day, we can settle down to watch what happens.

Here is a finding chart (made using the tool at RealClearPolitics) to help keep track of the important action.

Let me stress that this is not a prediction; it’s a guide for interpreting the results as they come in. Blue states are ones that Obama will almost certainly win, red states are ones that McCain almost certainly needs to win if he is to have a shot. If, as is perfectly plausible, Obama wins North Carolina or even Georgia, the rout is on, and we can settle down to the glorious task of nationalizing the means of production, collectivizing the farms, and redistributing the wealth.

But let’s imagine that we find McCain winning all of these red states. Note that the blue states add up to 243 electoral votes, while 270 are needed to secure victory, meaning that Obama needs to score 27 or more electoral votes from the gray states. Three plausible ways that could play out:

1. Florida. That’s 27 electoral votes right there, and the election would be over. However, voting in Florida rarely seems to go smoothly, and the race there is very tight.
2. Two states from Pennsylvania/Virginia/Ohio. Obama is way ahead in Pennsylvania and Virginia, so this is the most likely way for things to unfold tonight. If he wins any two of these three states, it’s over.
3. One state from Pennsylvania/Virginia/Ohio , and one or more smaller states to the West. This is the only real nail-biter scenario; note that it presumes that McCain wins Florida and all the red states. Overall not probable, but possible.

There are other possibilities — Obama loses all of PA/VA/OH/FL, but wins Indiana + Missouri + Colorado? — but those are not the way to bet. If PA/VA/OH/FL all go for McCain, gloom and doom will be the order of the day. (It’s worth emphasizing: not bloody likely.)

Poll closing times are listed here, so you can plan the evening’s festivities. Figure most results will be announced within an hour of poll closing. Florida is mixed, closing in some places at 7:00 Eastern time and in others at 8:00 Eastern, but nobody will be surprised if there are delays. So the most relevant times are Virginia (7:00 Eastern), Ohio (7:30 Eastern), and Pennsylvania (8:00 Eastern). The thing could be over early for us Left Coasters.

Recommended reading while the hour approaches: canvassing for Obama, vs. rallying for McCain. Recommended viewing: Girls 4 Obama at Shakesville.

The arena at Politico.com has an interesting Q&A today. The question is “What, for you, was the most memorable moment of this long race for the presidency.” The responses run from the obvious (Obama’s now famous race speech) to the very personal (`my 6-yr old daughter didn’t realize that a woman had never been president of the US’). Anyway, I invite you all to go have a look, provided you enjoy year-end lists.

And, I’d thought it would be great to hear from the ultra-intelligent, ultra-interesting, avid CV readers what their response is to this question. So, please, write a comment and let us know, “What, for you, was the most memorable moment of this long race for the presidency.”

I’ll start! For me, the most memorable moment happened last Saturday. I had just returned from China and called my parents to let them know I was home. The conversation turned to politics, inevitable this time of year. Usually we step on eggshells whenever this subject arises (my parents are die-hard Republicans, but I love them anyway), but this time we were all speechless. In awe of my Uncle Chuck.

Uncle Chuck is my favorite uncle – we are the scientists in the family. He came home after serving in the Navy in the South Pacific during WWII and went to school on the GI bill. Ended up with a master’s in mathematics. Worked at Oak Ridge National Lab on the very first computer systems. Went on to NASA and was one of the folks in charge of the computer program rewrites to get the Apollo 13 astronauts safely back home. He has done tremendous things and is very smart. But, he’s lived most of his life in the deep South and has somehow developed a deep racial prejudice that most of the family can’t understand. We have cringed for years whenever he has espoused on the virtues of the Bell Curve in regards to race. I could go on, but think I’ll hold back and just say he is the most racially bigoted person I know. I can’t fathom some of the things I have heard him say.

On Saturday, I learned that Uncle Chuck cast his early ballot for Senator Barack Obama for President of the USA. Nothing could have surprised me more! No matter what happens with the election tomorrow, Obama has already stirred deep, positive change in our society.

As has been discussed on CV before, Californians have an opportunity to vote on a ballot initiative to invalidate gay marriage in the state. While we’re being all endorse-y today, I’m throwing my two cents in with a link to a piece by a friend of mine:

We used to joke about it, or sort of joke, whenever we drove up to Vancouver to visit friends. “We’re married now!” We’d cry, after crossing through Customs and handing over all our papers and the Mermaid Girl’s birth certificate with both our names on it. And then, on the way home, as we passed the Peace Arch: “Not married any more! Hey, girlfriend!”

It wasn’t that funny, though, to tell the truth.

Read the whole thing, and then come back and tell me how giving this family legal protection has damaged the fabric of Canadian society.

I’m sure our blog audience includes a wide swath of undecided voters, a/k/a “Joe the Reader of Blogs.” (Okay, perhaps not.) So, to help along the decision-making process, here are some endorsements from respected sources.

If you are a reader of sciencey blogs, you have undoubtedly heard that Seed has endorsed Barack Obama. This is consistent with newspapers across the country, who have gone for Obama at the rate of 234 to 105 — a healthy difference with 2004, when Kerry squeaked by Bush, 213 to 205. The Economist has endorsed Obama; we’ve already mentioned the Financial Times. Even prominent conservative Stephen Colbert, not wanting to feel left out, has endorsed Obama. When McCain’s “supporters” offer up helpful testimony like this, who is to blame him?

Most interesting to me is that Nature has endorsed Obama for President. (Thanks to Alex Witze.) It’s interesting because Nature has been around a long time as one of the world’s premier scientific journals, and has never before endorsed a candidate for the U.S. Presidency. And their reasons sound pretty similar to mine:

But science is bound by, and committed to, a set of normative values — values that have application to political questions. Placing a disinterested view of the world as it is ahead of our views of how it should be; recognizing that ideas should be tested in as systematic a way as possible; appreciating that there are experts whose views and criticisms need to be taken seriously: these are all attributes of good science that can be usefully applied when making decisions about the world of which science is but a part. Writ larger, the core values of science are those of open debate within a free society that have come down to us from the Enlightenment in many forms, not the least of which is the constitution of the United States.

On a range of topics, science included, Obama has surrounded himself with a wider and more able cadre of advisers than McCain. This is not a panacea. Some of the policies Obama supports — continued subsidies for corn ethanol, for example — seem misguided. The advice of experts is all the more valuable when it is diverse: ‘groupthink’ is a problem in any job. Obama seems to understands this. He tends to seek a range of opinions and analyses to ensure that his own opinion, when reached, has been well considered and exposed to alternatives. He also exhibits pragmatism — for example in his proposals for health-care reform — that suggests a keen sense for the tests reality can bring to bear on policy.

Obama is very far away from being an infallible political savior, and if he wins I’m sure there will be times when he does the wrong thing. But, to reiterate something I said at American Airspace, he thinks like an academic in the best sense of the word. He listens, and considers what he hears critically and analytically, and then comes to a conclusion and deals with the consequences. Even if I don’t always agree with the conclusions, it will be an unambiguous blessing to at long last have a President with that cast of mind.

We can close with some words from the guy who invented quarks.

It’s not only socialists and Muslims who get trotted out when the masses need to be scared into voting Republican. Here’s Elizabeth Dole’s latest ad for her North Carolina Senate race. Via.

Note that, via Balloon Juice, Dole’s opponent Kay Hagan is a Sunday School teacher. What would Dole say if an actual atheist were running?

The sometimes crazy, sometimes razor-sharp Christopher Hitchens lets loose in Slate about Sarah Palin’s war on science. He hits most of the high points – fruit flies, grizzlies, and creationism (but misses the overhead projector nonsense). In any case, it’s worth a read, and I’ll just leave you with his concluding paragraph, to set the scene

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just “people of faith” but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

Hitchens is such an elitist, and clearly not from Real America^©.

If you were watching the third Presidential debate, you may have noticed that John McCain had hit on a new line of attack: Barack Obama wants to “redistribute wealth.” To those of us who interpret phrases by attaching meanings to the individual words within them, this comes off as pretty weak sauce. Of course Barack Obama wants the government to redistribute wealth; so does John McCain. That’s one of the things that government does. Every time the government takes money in the form of taxes or fees, or spends money on social services or public works or anything else at all, it redistributes wealth. Most obviously, we have a progressive tax system: people with higher incomes (supposedly) pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes. This is nothing new, and no mainstream candidate for national office proposes to do away with it.

Admittedly, as a country we are not very good at redistributing wealth. The gap between rich and poor in the U.S. is larger than in any other developed country. And progressive taxation isn’t nearly what it appears at first blush:

Even in the United States, the rich pay a disproportionate share of the federal income tax, which mildly reduces inequality. Other taxes, however, like Social Security, are regressive: the rich pay a lesser share. Thus, the upper tenth of households pay 70 percent of the income tax, but only 52 percent of all federal taxes. State sales taxes make the system even more regressive, because poorer people spend a higher share of their total income on them. Kevin Hassett, of the American Enterprise Institute, estimates that a family of four earning $50,000 pays exactly the same share of its income (30 percent) on taxes as one earning $150,000.

There’s little question that Obama’s policies would be slightly more redistributive than the status quo. Most obviously, he wants to raise taxes on the upper few percent of earners, and cut taxes to the middle class; he also proposes to expand health care coverage quite a bit. These are concrete policy proposals that are squarely in the mainstream of popular debate — his health care proposal was notably less ambitious than those of Hillary Clinton or John Edwards — but are certainly arguable; a freeze on health-care spending and a giant tax cut for the wealthiest Americans is also squarely within the mainstream of popular debate. Here is the graph of the impact that Obama’s and McCain’s tax proposals would have on different income groups:

Obama’s plan would hit the upper 1%, who benefited the most from Bush’s tax cuts, and it would lighten the burden on the lower 80%; McCain’s help is targeted at the top 20%, and (by virtue of not raising taxes on anyone) would cost an extra trillion dollars over ten years. Given what passes for a mainstream consensus in contemporary U.S. politics, the choice between these two options is considered to be a close one. So there is nothing crazy or desperate about criticizing Obama’s proposals on the merits.

But McCain and his supporters aren’t fretting over graphs of the growth of American inequality, or even over the distribution of tax rates. They are fretting over this, the histogram of likely electoral-college outcomes from fivethirtyeight.com:

As a response to this stark reality, they have decided to seize upon “redistribute wealth” not in terms of the actual meaning of its actual words, but as a slogan of SECRET SOCIALISM. For whatever reasons — this is a matter for future psychohistorians, not for humble physicist/bloggers — a substantial segment of right-wing punditry refuses to believe that Barack Obama is what he says he is, or what he has actually acted like his entire adult life: a thoughtful center-left politician. They have no doubt that he is the most radical figure ever to come this close to the Presidency.

Obama’s entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The “change” he peddles is not new. We’ve seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism… Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He’s not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks “fundamental change,” i.e., to remake society.

To these folks, “redistribute wealth” isn’t a straightforward description of how the government operates under the present system. Rather, it’s a slip of the tongue, revealing the dictatorship-of-the-proletariat leanings hidden behind the nonthreatening exterior. And here is the revealing moment to which McCain was referring in that debate, when Obama explains to Joe the Plumber how his plans will remake Amerikkka as a socialist utopia:
(more…)

Q: Why is fundamentalist Christianity better than string theory?

A: Because it makes testable predictions.

Here is a prediction, from none other than Sarah Palin: God will intervene on Election Day.

In an interview posted online Wednesday, Sarah Palin told Dr. James Dobson of “Focus on the Family” that she is confident God will do “the right thing for America” on Nov. 4.

Dobson asked the vice presidential hopeful if she is concerned about John McCain’s sagging poll numbers, but Palin stressed that she was “not discouraged at all.”

“To me, it motivates us, makes us work that much harder,” she told the influential Christian leader, whose radio show reaches millions of listeners daily. “And it also strengthens my faith because I know at the end of the day putting this in God’s hands, the right thing for America will be done, at the end of the day on Nov. 4.”

…

She also thanked her supporters — including Dobson, who said he and his wife were asking “for God’s intervention” on election day — for their prayers of support.

“It is that intercession that is so needed,” she said. “And so greatly appreciated. And I can feel it too, Dr. Dobson. I can feel the power of prayer, and that strength that is provided through our prayer warriors across this nation. And I so appreciate it.”

Admittedly, not a very good testable prediction. I doubt that we’ll see wholesale conversion to atheism on November 5th if Obama wins. More likely, we will be told that this is just an exceptionally subtle part of God’s plan. It’s like predicting supersymmetry at the LHC!

I went on a brief trip to Ireland and England a couple of weeks ago. You know what they couldn’t stop talking about? Sarah Palin. And religious Americans more generally. This pretty much sums up why:

I understand that later on in the interview, Tracy claims that the bit in the Gospels about loving your neighbors was “probably inserted by Communists,” and she raised her eyebrows so high that her eyeballs popped completely out of her head.

Via Greg Laden, apparently originating at Fark.com: the candidates as trains.

For American citizens, there is a Presidential election fast approaching. (Have you heard about it?) Election Day is Tuesday, November 4. It’s time to register to vote. The Obama campaign has set up a great tool that let’s you figure out whether you are already registered, and if not, prints out a form you can mail in to do so:

• Register to Vote

It works for Republicans, too! Even Republicans who want to vote for a Republican this time around, although those are increasingly scarce.

If you think this election is important, you can go even further and donate money. Ad buys are crucial, of course, but get-out-the-vote efforts will be equally important, and they don’t come cheap.

• Barack Obama
• John McCain

There are also various third party candidates. Sadly, the Socialist Workers Party has nominated Róger Calero, who was born in Nicaragua, and is therefore ineligible to be President. If he wins, it will be quite the constitutional crisis!

For those who can’t make it to a polling station on Election Day, deadlines are very fast approaching for absentee voting. Start here:

• Long Distance Voters

Note that there’s nothing stopping you from absentee voting even if you could vote in person on Election Day; if you’re feeling motivated right now but might be lazy on November 4, why not vote right away?